A lawsuit filed by several Jewish families in New York against the Pine Bush Central School District in White Plains can proceed, a federal court ruled.
The lawsuit claims that the students’ rights were violated by “rampant anti-Semitic discrimination and harassment” and “deliberate indifference” by school officials, according to The New York Times. The families are seeking an unspecified amount in monetary damages.
In recent years, Jewish students attending schools in the Pine Bush district have complained of various anti-Semitic incidents, including anti-Semitic slurs and nicknames, drawings of swastikas, jokes about the Holocaust, physical violence, and fellow students forcing them to retrieve coins from the ground and/or dumpsters.
Jewish students also accused fellow students of making Nazi salutes, telling anti-Semitic jokes, and shouting out “white power” chants.
Judge Kenneth Karas of the U.S. District Court in White Plains, NY, on Tuesday denied the school district’s motion to dismiss three of the five children named in the 2012 lawsuit, which also implicated school administrators as not doing enough to combat harassment.
Karas wrote in his opinion that a jury could reasonably find that the children had “suffered severe and discriminatory harassment, that the district had actual knowledge of the harassment, and that the district was deliberately indifferent to the harassment,” The New York Times reported.
The district’s superintendent, Joan Carbone, responded to the judge’s decision to allow the trial to proceed in the following statement.
“We are obviously disappointed by this ruling but we will have the opportunity at trial to demonstrate that the District and individual administrators were not indifferent to allegations of anti-Semitism,” she wrote.
The school district maintains it took appropriate disciplinary actions against anti-Semitic activity occurring at the school – and that the phenomenon is not widespread in the district.
However, some school officials have admitted in court depositions that there is a serious problem.
Part of the reason for the lawsuit, the families say, is that essential changes be made to the culture of anti-Semitism in the district – that is, to eliminate it entirely.
